Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. We have a special show for you today. I am here in

Washington, D.C., where I'm about to sit down with the leadership of the Harris Walls campaign

for their first interview about what happened in the election. Last week, Michael Tyler,

who's a communications director for the campaign, called me and said that they were ready to speak and that they wanted to have that conversation on Pod Save America.

This is the first time that any of them have done an interview since the election.

They don't pretend to have all the answers here.

There's way more to cover than we could possibly cover in one podcast.

This is the beginning of a conversation about understanding what happened in 2024

and learning the lessons that Democrats are going to need going forward. Here in Washington with me

are Harris Wall's campaign manager, Jenna Malli Dylan, Quentin Fulkes, who is the deputy

campaign manager, and oversaw paid advertising, Stephanie Cutter, who oversaw messaging and communications.

And joining by Zoom was David Ploth, who consulted on all of it.

Jen, Quentin, Stephanie, David, thanks for joining us. Thank you for doing this.

Very much appreciate you having this conversation with us here on Ponce of America.

Just a level set, Jen, and I'll start with you. How did you feel going into election day?

And at what point did you have a sense that things were beginning to break Trump's way?

Was there a county results, something about the turnout?

Like, was there a moment when you sort of understood that how it was going to end?

Well, the truth is that we really thought this was a very close race.

We talked about the entire time we saw it

as a margin of error race, almost the entire time the vice president was in the race. And

we knew we had to have strong turnout on election day. We saw early vote really ending strong

...